Publications
APS Bulletin • Volume 6, Number 4, July/August 1996
From the Editor
Exploring Consciousness While in Pain
C. Richard Chapman, PhD
In April 1996, the University of Arizona sponsored a 5-day meeting called “Toward a Science of Consciousness 1996.” Once out-of-bounds for serious scientists, consciousness seems to have come of age. The Fetzer Institute, a long-standing friend of pain research, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences contributed substantial support to the meeting. I attended the conference principally to discern the potential relationship of pain research to the emerging and rapidly growing field of consciousness study. This article reports my experience and some afterthoughts.
The primary organizer for the conference, University of Arizona anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, MD, described the character of the meeting aptly: “We want a spectrum of approaches brought to bear on the problem-reductionism, materialism, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, mathematics and physics, and also phenomenological approaches ranging from introspection and aesthetics to parapsychology.” Thus, like most large pain meetings, this conference was multidisciplinary. However, it brought a different mix of professionals to the table. Neuroscientists at the meeting rubbed elbows with philosophers, artificial intelligence and robotics experts, scholars of comparative religion, mathematicians, and physicists. Meditators, mystics, complementary medicine healers, and parapsychologists added color to the conceptual landscape.
Surveying the consciousness camps
I learned to set disciplines aside and see consciousness researchers as belonging to several camps. One camp, championed by philosopher David Chalmers (University of California, Santa Cruz), asserted that the principal mission of the consciousness investigator is to address the “hard problem” of how subjective experience emerges from a material brain. The neuroscientists, who seemed to constitute the largest camp, disagreed. They collectively held that consciousness is a product of the brain and the obvious principal goal is to understand how the brain works. Solving that should make the “hard problem” go away.
But for another camp, the computationalists, central neurophysiology was a low priority. They turned their attention to the gap between neuronal activity and phenomenal experience. The computationalists (neural networkers, mathematical modelers) stressed the computational nature of preconscious processes and the importance of mathematically modeling such processes. Aspects of consciousness break down into algorithms, and one can replicate algorithms in computers. Some contended that ultimately they could copy the algorithmic stuff of mind and paste it into the silicon chips of computers, thus creating machine intelligence-a dynamic intelligence that will evolve with the aid of “evolutionary programming” that incorporates aspects of Darwinian natural selection. Strident objectors in another camp, like Berkeley philosopher John Searle, held that consciousness is an emergent property of a carbon-based brain living within a body that negotiates with the physical world. For Searle, consciousness is an emergent property of human brain activity just as liquidity is an emergent property of combined hydrogen and oxygen molecules at certain temperatures. Modeling with algorithms is simply simulation; it cannot recapitulate subjective experience. As regards pain, some people I met thought it unethical to attempt constructing a silicon-based intelligence that would “hurt.”
Emergent hierarchists came forward to argue that nature is organized hierarchically in strata, with each stratum producing novel emergent properties. As consciousness emerges from neurological activity, so culture emerges from consciousness. This position has a clear appeal because it might allow one to tie everything together into a coherent whole. However, conceptual coherence was not a feature of this conference. At times it seemed that hundreds of brilliant, fertile, and highly idiosyncratic imaginations were running amok under a single roof.
Last, but certainly not least, there were the quantum mechanical physicists, boldly going where no one has gone before. Championed by Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, this group contended that consciousness is the product of quantum events within the microtubule environment of cortical cells. More specifically, microtubules-cylindrical tubes of protein molecules, called tubulin, which form the internal skeleton of cells-provide a brain environment in which quantum events can multiply until collectively they become powerful enough to resolve the uncertainty of a state of neural activation, producing subjective experience as a consequence. Because this idea seems to produce mind from body, it has a dualist flavor. Philosopher Patricia Churchland (University of California, San Diego) tartly commented that the explanatory power of this approach rivaled that of “pixie dust in the synapses.” Wedding the mystery of quantum mechanics with the mystery of consciousness did not constitute an explanation in her view.
Considering consciousness and pain
This was a vibrant meeting, filled with creativity, energy, and vigorous argument. I had an opportunity to chat with several philosophers, a quantum physicist, numerous neuroscientists and psychologists, various physicians, and a defense scientist striving to design an artificially intelligent air-to-air missile capable of recognizing and uniquely pursuing its target. I found much of the discourse, formal and informal, rife with implications for how we conceive of, measure, and treat pain. For example, Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that sensory researchers not only identify transduction at the receptor level, they also assume that a second level of transduction occurs centrally when the stream of neural signaling is somehow converted into awareness. Dennett attacked the “double transduction” assumption and the very idea that consciousness exists as a unique state.
Does consciousness control our behavior or is it just an epiphenomenon associated with our behavior? Touch a hot stove and you will quickly withdraw your hand. Did awareness of pain cause you to do that? No, the pain happened later-too late to govern the behavior. For University of London Professor Jeffrey Gray, “action-before-consciousness” is the rule, not the exception. We are aware 100 to 200 msec too late to really be in control of our actions. First we grimace, then we hurt. This raises fascinating questions about pain and challenges some of our assumptions. Is the primary purpose of nociception to send sensory messages or to excite flexor reflex afferents?
As far as I know, Yoshi Nakamura, PhD, and I were the only APS members to attend this conference. We shared a presentation that would, we hoped, open a pipeline of communication between the field of pain and the study of consciousness. Pain is a fruitful area for exploring the vagaries of consciousness. We spoke about properties of pain that one cannot study readily in more familiar perceptual modalities, like vision. These included conscious experience modulating pain (e.g., hypnotic pain control) and the sense of a body self (e.g., the painful phantom limb). This discussion succeeded in capturing the interest of some of the computationalists and some physicians.
Being conscious of consciousness
There are many reasons why we, collectively, need to keep an eye on the emerging field of consciousness. In my opinion, it is a sleeping giant that has just begun to stir. When it has fully awakened and stood erect, its shadow may well obscure all the other fields that address subjective experience. This seems inescapable because consciousness bridges disciplines as disparate as quantum mechanical physics and psychology, and it creates powerful synergy across disciplines. Moreover, consciousness research addresses the fundamental questions that have haunted people through the ages, cutting to the very root of what it means to be alive and human: “Why and how are we aware?” “What is free will?” “What is the self?”
The conference led me to realize that significant progress in this area could ultimately shake the very foundations of neuroscience and of the social and behavioral sciences. If this happens, pain research will not escape the turmoil. Pain is a phenomenon of consciousness, and our mission, to relieve suffering, has a state of consciousness as its end point. It now seems clear that consciousness research will continue to emerge as a science, gaining momentum rapidly. I submit that we must choose to take a significant role in the renaissance of consciousness, rather than let it drag us (kicking and screaming, perhaps?) away from our comfortable parochial perspectives. By getting involved, we can make pain a prominent feature for multidisciplinary science to address under the overarching theme of consciousness research.
All in all, “Toward a Science of Consciousness 1996” was an extraordinary experience. I hope that other APS members will attend this meeting in the future. As always, letters to the editor are welcome.
World Wide Web References
University of Arizona record of the conference http://www.eu.arizona.edu/~uaextend/conferen/consc.html
Reviews of the conference on THESIS http://thesis.newsint.co.uk/SPECIAL/tdayintr.html
Coverage by the The New York Times http://www.eu.arizona.edu/~uaextend/conferen/consc/nyt.html
Coverage by New Scientist (You must register and join at no cost before you can enter.) http://www.newscientist.com/ps/limit/conscious/index.html
PSYCHE-An International Journal of Research on Consciousness http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au
C. Richard Chapman is professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Contact him via E-mail at crc@u.washington.edu.